And a fair number of those were bought by real estate professionals I suspect…
Last week at Real Estate Connect, the Flip came up in conversation numerous times and I can’t count how many of them I saw being wielded by content-hungry conference-goers over the three days in San Francisco.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised today when Pure Digital, the company behind the popular Flip video cameras, announced that it has sold its one-millionth unit in the US. They also reported that, according to research conducted by the NPD Group, the Flip Ultra is the #1 selling camcorder in the US based on sales through June 2008. A quick search on Amazon.com confirms their popularity.
I spoke with Pure Digital’s CEO Director of Marketing Scott Kabat this morning and asked him more specifically about the Flip’s impact in the real estate industry. Interestingly, he told me his mother is a real estate agent and while the Flip was not designed specifically for this industry, he was definitely conscious of agents’ needs. Pure Digital’s goal is to make video production simple, portable and affordable – qualities that most definitely line up with the real estate industry’s requirements.
He also shared with me that the company has overcome one of the long standing complaints about the Flip – its incompatibility with the Mac. Pure Digital has been working with Apple and recent updates to Quicktime and iMovie now mean that the video files shot by the Flip can now be imported directly into Apple’s video applications. This is a huge win for us OS X users.
Finally, Kabat intimated that they are aggressively developing the Flip software to allow for seamless uploading to online video-sharing sites; which includes YouTube and now AOL and Myspace. Future versions of the software may also include the ability to upload to real estate-specific video hosts and web sites as well.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the Flip (minor quibbles aside). The hardware is stunningly simple to use for the non-technical crowd and the software is quickly becoming more and more useful too. The marriage between the two (hardware and software) is what will drive greater and greater adoption of video. And for the real estate industry that can’t come soon enough.
